Why did a rather empty essay by Jill Lepore bother me so much yesterday?
I was in the middle of reading articles on Cassirer then Habermas and had found one on Jonathan Israel who wrote a massive history of the `Radical' Enlightenment. The articles were great. Two were in the New Republic and available without subscription. They were on topics I was in the middle of trying to figure out. And, in came Jill ... bitching we're out of coffee.
So here are the essays. They are both book reviews. I would have immediately just ordered the books because they cover a part of the history ideas that are directly related to my Strauss jones. But money is tight and these books ain't cheap.
The first by David A. Bell reviews Jonathan Israel's latest, ``Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750--1790.''
``There's something about the Enlightenment. Today, few educated men and women spend much time debating whether Western civilization took a disastrously wrong turn in the High Middle Ages. They do not blame all manner of political ills on Romanticism, or insist that non-Western immigrants adopt Renaissance values. But the Enlightenment is different. It has been held responsible for everything from the American Constitution to the Holocaust. It has been defended as the birthplace of human rights and condemned as intolerant, cold, abstract, imperialist, racist, misogynist, and anti-religious. Edmund Burke, in one of the most eloquent early attacks, excoriated `this new conquering empire of light and reason.' One hundred fifty years later, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno declared bluntly that `enlightenment is totalitarian.' ''
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/100556/spinoza-kant-enlightenment-ideas
Bell takes Israel down by historical detail and counter facts, which is a good exercise, and maybe Israel deserves a few bruises. It's a reminder that when you write on a topic that a lot of well educated and studied people know a lot about, you've got to cover your thesis. Bell teaches early modern french history (enlightenment and revolution) at Princeton. I went through Israel's 1000 plus pages of Radical Enlightenment as part of the background on Spinoza. It's a few years ago now, but he made his case in that book that Spinoza was a more radical break than figures like Leibnez and Locke. It shouldn't have taken so much paper to demonstrate a point that can be put in one sentence. Locke's point was freedom to practice religion, while Spinoza's point was freedom from religion. Thankfully Israel condensed this point into a single essay somewhere, that I read before getting the book. Anyway, most of these academic points are involved in the blood and guts of today's videos on gas attacks in Syria.
The other article, also from the New Republic (December 2011) is by Peter Gordon who teaches (guess what) modern history of ideas at Harvard. It is a book review of Jurgen Habermas, ``An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Seclar Age.''
``HABERMAS CAME TO maturity as a philosopher in the left-Hegelian tradition of Western Marxism, which typically excoriated religion as an illusory diversion from the profane task of this-worldly redemption. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in 1843, Marx offered a definition: `Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.' He then added the famous line: `It is the opium of the people.' But Marx did not mean to suggest that getting over religion was a simple affair of casting aside false beliefs. (The opium-analogy is revealing: kicking a drug habit is hardly easy.) The thought was that religion serves a compensatory function insofar as it offers an unfree humanity a fantasy-an image of happiness-that reconciles them to their present unhappiness. This is why one cannot hope to redeem humanity from its unhappiness if one confines oneself only to the intellectual criticism of religion. One has to change the unhappy conditions for which religion offers compensation: `The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.' But there is an ambiguity in this theory. Did Marx mean to suggest that religion does nothing but conspire to obscure the actual conditions of our unhappiness? That is an observation only about the social function of religion rather than its propositional content. Marx also seemed to be saying that religion may contain the right insights-our suffering must be overcome, our hope for happiness deserves satisfaction-only those insights are applied to the wrong realm, a metaphysical beyond rather than the profane space of human action.''
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/98567/jurgen-habermas-religion-philosophy
This wasn't as well written and way too wordy, but interesting because it tracks the endless war news in its own abstract way. For me the points provide some critical material to help dismantle Strauss's obsession with what he called the theological and political dilemma. I don't see any dilemma of course. My interest in religion is almost entirely devoted to the arts produced by numerous religious cosmologies. This interest is the answer to Habermas's worry that religion might offer gifts not available to reason. Sure, metaphysical visions don't rationalize well, but they can make for great art. So, what's the problem here?
In any event, the essay is long and probably boring on some account, but it gives me a lot of material to use. The more direct relevance to events of the day is directed at Europe and its struggles to find accommodation for the influx of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.